That little sliver that's the audience for Blood Bowl.

Quick — what’s the difference between the Yankees buying championships and that guy with the Darksteel Forge & Platinum Angel deck? If the average Indianapolis fan met the Mannings, could you tell the difference between him and the Robot Chicken tauntaun guy?

I live in the Venn diagram’s intersection between sports and gaming, and I’m amazed at how lonely it is — not because fantasy leagues are 90% number-crunching, or any of the other obvious reasons, but because sports and gaming are the same things. Whether you’re playing them or just jawing about them, there’s no difference between football and 40K, because they’re both recipes for instant interaction.

It’s relatively easy for me to meet people if I’ve got even a friend of a friend to introduce me. If I’m going in completely cold, though, it’s a bitch and a half even (especially?) for me. “Hey, I know you’re all standing around in a closed-off circle and you don’t know me from the Zodiac, but here I am!” It occasionally amazes me how little of an opening I need (#ego), but without that foot in the door, I’m completely lost.

And then there’s a dive bar, The Funhouse, that has a basketball hoop set up outside. Making an approach might be almost impossible, but I can get a game of H-O-R-S-E going with strangers no problem. And when I heard a guy at Tully’s talking on his cell about picking up his army, all I had to do was ask “Fantasy or 40K?” and I had his life story (professional Yu-Gi-Oh! player, apparently). Games are games; all anyone needs is an excuse to play or talk about them. That’s just as true for guys wearing a PAX shirt as an A-Rod jersey.

Yeah, you’re going to run into dickwads… in both halves of the Venn’, unfortunately. I played Risk on Friday with one, the kind of guy who I kinda feel bad for calling out like this. He didn’t really get that we were playing for fun, so when I groaned about forgetting my bonus armies, he relished it. That and there were a few lines of social appropriateness that he crossed that made me suppress my Beta face, but I won’t get into that. Suffice to say that he was probably gaming’s answer to The Bro. So no, gaming isn’t some paradise free of the high-school football jocks.

And yet, shit-talking (when it goes both ways) is the real sign that everyone’s having fun. Whodathunk that alpha-male skirmishing was as much a part of CCGs as the MLB?

//Also, if the Niners had won today, every active Bay Area team would’ve won their latest games. So damned close.